Greek and Roman Oratory

Greek and Roman Oratory

Greek and Roman Oratory

Edited by Bob Blaisdell

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: MARY CAROLYN WALDREP

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JIM MILLER

Copyright

Copyright © 2014 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

Greek and Roman Oratory is a new work, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2014.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-78290-4

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

49622801   2014

www.doverpublications.com

Contents

Note

ARCHIDAMUS and STHENELAIDAS

Responses to the Addresses of the Corinthians and the Athenians on Sparta Going to War Against Athens (432 B.C.)

PERICLES

In Favor of the War (432 B.C.)

Funeral Speech (431/430 B.C.)

On the Athenian National Spirit (430 B.C.)

CLEON Versus DIODOTUS

On Sentencing the Mytilenaeans to Death (427 B.C.)

ALCIBIADES Versus NICIAS

On the Athenian Expedition to Sicily (414 B.C.)

XENOPHON

The March Up Country (401 B.C.)

SOCRATES

The Apology (399 B.C.)

DEMOSTHENES

The First Philippic (351 B.C.)

HEGESIPPUS

On the Halonnesus (342 B.C.)

DEMOSTHENES

On the State of the Chersonesus (342 B.C.)

LUCIUS LENTULUS

On Treating with the Samnites (321 B.C.)

P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO

To His Soldiers (218 B.C.)

MARCUS JUNIUS Versus TITUS MANLIUS TORQUATUS

On Ransoming the Prisoners (216 B.C.)

CAIUS MEMMIUS

Against the Power of the Nobility (c. 110 B.C.)

LUCIUS PHILIPPUS

Against Lepidus (78 B.C.)

CATILINE

To the Conspirators (63 B.C.)

JULIUS CAESAR

On the Punishment of the Catiline Conspirators (63 B.C.)

CICERO

The First Oration against Catiline (63 B.C.)

CATILINE

To His Soldiers (62 B.C.)

CICERO

The Fourth Philippic (44 B.C.)

JULIUS AGRICOLA

To His Soldiers in Britain (84 A.D.)

Sources & Selected Bibliography

NOTE

Never in my opinion would the founders of cities have induced their unsettled multitudes to form communities had they not moved them by the magic of their eloquence: never without the highest gifts of oratory would the great legislators have constrained mankind to submit themselves to the yoke of law. Nay, even the principles which should guide our life, however fair they may be by nature, yet have greater power to mold the mind to virtue, when the beauty of things is illumined by the splendor of eloquence.

—Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria¹

There are many good reasons to read the Greek and Roman classics, perhaps the first being the pleasure of being in the company of ancient minds creating the modern mind. The past seems present. In their histories and impromptu speeches we encounter all of our familiar problems of negotiating social dynamics in the midst of international politics or of justifying warfare. Despite the full complement of shysters and criminals among the orators, the Greek and Roman statesmen can make us wish our own politicians and thinkers were as vigorous and intelligent, as incisive and bold. When oratory is considered in all its periods, wrote Guy Carleton Lee, the compiler of a vast collection of the world’s speeches, it will be found that although there are vestiges of eloquence in the sacred writings of the Hebrews, and various manifestations of the divine gift among other great nations of ancient times, yet it was among the Greeks that public speech as an art took its origin, had its development, and attained its acme; and in the period of its perfect flower produced the models of eloquence for all succeeding statesmen and orators.²

I have assembled over twenty speeches here that for the most part are famous less for their effect on events of the time than for the elation readers ever after have felt as they reimagine these situations in which various leaders attempt to raise spirits or turn a tide. There are orators we appreciate as heroes (e.g. Pericles, Socrates, Demosthenes, Cicero) as well as those we pity as villains; for example, our sympathetic understanding of the dastardly Catiline results from our appreciation of his chutzpah and recklessness of purpose, his impending doom. We can enjoy slippery Alcibiades irresistibly advocating for Athens’ mistaken and fateful assault on Sicily.

The men who recorded or recreated or reimagined these speeches were geniuses of expression. Quintilian, who ran an ancient school of rhetoric, reflects: Is it not a noble thing, by employing the understanding which is common to mankind and the words that are used by all, to win such honor and glory that you seem not to speak or plead, but rather, as was said of Pericles, to thunder and lighten?³ What was fresh to the orators and their audiences remains fresh today.

Thucydides, a writer whose mind makes an overwhelming impression on his reader,⁴ in his History of the Peloponnesian War, is the source for several of the speeches; he remains for some of us the ideal historian, a participant in and intense recorder of the events he describes and relates, continually reminding himself and us that his work is not one of fancy or wish-fulfillment, but rigorous research: As to the speeches which were made either before or during the war, it was hard for me, and for others who reported them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavored, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually said. Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eyewitnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other.⁵ Thucydides believed in the importance of detailing the unfolding years of the war and though in the midst of them, writes ever dramatically, seriously, intently.

The little that we know about Thucydides is furnished by himself, writes the classicist Edward Capps. At the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, in 431 B. C., he was a man of maturity; we may therefore place the date of his birth about 470 B. C. An Athenian by birth, his father’s family were originally Thracians, closely related to the wife of Miltiades, the hero of Marathon. We can only conjecture what were the influences which surrounded his youth and early manhood; but since his family was wealthy and influential, and he himself exceptionally endowed by nature, we may believe that he participated fully in the marvelous and many-sided culture for which the age of Pericles was distinguished. For a time after the outbreak of the war he was one of the Athenian generals. In 424 B. C. an event occurred, however, which doubtless seemed a heavy misfortune to him, though in reality it was the turning-point of his life and opened to him the career for which his talents best fitted him. While he was in command of an Athenian fleet off the Thracian coast, the Spartan general Brasidas surprised and captured Amphipolis, the principal Athenian possession in northern Greece. Thucydides was near enough to have prevented the capture of the stronghold, but he lingered in the neighborhood of some gold mines which belonged to him and arrived too late. Whatever the reason was for his delay, the Athenians promptly deprived him of his command, and he lived in exile for twenty years, until the end of the war in 404 B. C. During this time he followed the war closely, gathered facts from the Spartan as well as from the Athenian side, visited many important sites, probably including Sicily, and thus laboriously and conscientiously got together the materials for his history. He died about 398 B. C.⁶

The speeches Thucydides relates are always closely reasoned; everybody in his history is similar in that they’re smart, even the most violent of Athenians Cleon, who, in the midst of ruthless and cynical insights, occasionally startles us with simple brilliance: Mankind apparently find it easier to drive away adversity than to retain prosperity. Thucydides does not admire chameleons like Alcibiades, but he presents in quick, sharp strokes Alcibiades’ energy, talents and peculiarities: He had a great position among the citizens and was devoted to horseracing and other pleasures which outran his means. And in the end his wild courses went far to ruin the Athenian state. The objection that Thucydides was not an eyewitness to all of the speeches and his own admission that the speeches are at least in part creations of his understanding of the men and events he narrates does not diminish or distract from the speeches’ power and illumination. History’s great speeches have rarely been, until fairly recently when electronic recordings have been possible, actual transcriptions. We have vast evidence, for instance, of discrepant reportage of speeches during the American Civil War and even today, we note the discrepancies between press releases of political speeches and their actual deliveries.

There’s no going back 2,500 years, so we’re left with the gold Thucydides, among others, mined for us. Quintilian observes, Do we have access to these outstanding speakers in any way other than through their writings? We have Plato’s extraordinary rendering of Socrates’ defense during his trial in 399 B.C. and, just as fortunate, we have the make-shift general Xenophon’s account of the speech he himself delivered to the survivors of the Greek mercenary army that had to fight their way out of Asia Minor. (Apparently, speechmakers did not write down or publish their own words until the fourth century B.C.) We meet Demosthenes in two speeches he set down in print, though the classicist Catherine Steel cautions us that written versions of speeches are rather peculiar things which occupy an inescapably secondary position, deriving much of their meaning from an event of which they are now the only, partial, record.⁷ True enough, but with these speakers, partial is still awfully good.

The Roman historians Sallust and Livy and Tacitus, something in the manner of Thucydides, offer speeches for the heroes of Roman history that are dramatic and inspiring. The most prominent orator of Rome, Cicero, was famous for his speeches even when he did not apparently always deliver the speech himself (as in his Second Philippic). Cicero, unlike the Greeks, asserted his personality the way a character actor might, and flavors the tone with his distinctive personality throughout.

So while these exciting speeches are certainly not transcripts, we believe in them the way readers have forever believed in the truth of storytelling about real events. We weigh them and are captivated by the vigor and the expressiveness of their words: When a man insists that words ought not to be our guides in action, argues the Athenian Diodotus (a debater known to us only because of Thucydides), he is either wanting in sense or wanting in honesty: he is wanting in sense if he does not see that there is no other way in which we can throw light on the unknown future . . .⁸

In my selections I have relied first on my love of Thucydides and next on the knowledge and work of editors of previous collections of oratory, most notably Guy Carleton Lee. The speeches by the Attic Orators are scarcely represented, because most of their extant speeches are legal arguments or cases; the speeches from history seem more dramatic and more compelling, less clever and calculated, more spontaneous and of greater impact. Demosthenes, the most admired of Greek orators, has many speeches that seem to me legal exercises, models of persuasiveness and construction—yet less vital than the speeches in which he is mesmerizing not a courtroom jury but an assembly of citizens or soldiers.

Occasionally I quote from the historians’ narratives to provide some of the immediate dramatic context of the speeches and to link one speech’s response to the next. I have not cut or abridged the speeches from the sources, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that the history behind each speech is rich and deep—and available in some of the most spellbinding historical works ever written, some of which I have listed in the bibliography. I have used American spelling throughout and added paragraph breaks; though some of the translations are centuries old, only a handful of rephrasings seemed to be needed. English translators have always well appreciated the vigor and directness of the Greeks and Romans.

¹Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Translated by H. E. Butler. London: William Heineman. 1933.

²Guy Carleton Lee. Orators of Ancient Greece. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1900.

³Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Translated by H. E. Butler. London: William Heineman. 1933.

⁴H. D. F. Kitto. The Greeks. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. 1973. 138. Kitto adds: "For concentrated power and profound comprehension of things only two other Greek writers can stand with Thucydides: one is Aeschylus, and the other is the poet who wrote the Iliad."

⁵Thucydides Translated into English, With Introduction, Marginal Analysis, Notes, and Indices. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford at the Clarendon Press. 1881. I: 22.

⁶Edward Capps. From Homer to Theocritus: A Manual of Greek Literature. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1901.

⁷Catherine Steel. Roman Oratory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Classical Association. 2006. 26.

⁸See below, page 39.

ARCHIDAMUS and STHENELAIDAS

RESPONSES TO THE ADDRESSES OF THE CORINTHIANS AND THE ATHENIANS ON SPARTA GOING TO WAR AGAINST ATHENS (432 B.C.)

This selection, a series of four speeches, at the Peloponnesian Confederacy’s Congress at Sparta, comes from Part 1 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The war, between Sparta (situated on the Peloponnese) and its allies and Athens and its allies, lasted twenty-seven years, from 431 until 404 B.C., and resulted in the defeat of Athenian cultural and political dominance in Greece. The first of the speeches, by the Corinthians, is an attempt to goad the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) into war by reminding them of the encroachments of Athens, most recently into Potidea.

Famously and extraordinarily, the Corinthians sum up the character of the Athenians in a way that continues to resound—and which the Athenians themselves would not have resented: They are revolutionary, equally quick in the conception and in the execution of every new plan . . . They are bold beyond their strength; they run risks which prudence would condemn; and in the midst of misfortune they are full of hope. . . . They are impetuous . . . For they hope to gain something by leaving their homes . . . When conquerors, they pursue their victory to the utmost; when defeated, they fall back the least. Their bodies they devote to their country as though they belonged to other men; their true self is their mind, which is most truly their own when employed in her service. When they do not carry out an intention which they have formed, they seem to themselves to have sustained a personal bereavement; when an enterprise succeeds, they have gained a mere installment of what is to come; but if they fail, they at once conceive new hopes and so fill up the void. With them alone to hope is to have, for they lose not a moment in the execution of an idea. This is the lifelong task, full of danger and toil, which they are always imposing upon themselves. None enjoy their good things less, because they are always seeking for more. To do their duty is their only holiday, and they deem the quiet of inaction to be as disagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a man should say of them, in a word, that they were born neither to have peace themselves, nor to allow peace to other men, he would simply speak the truth.¹

The Athenian embassy then makes the case for continued peace: How moderate we are would speedily appear if others took our place; indeed our very moderation, which should be our glory, has been unjustly converted into a reproach. Then, with the Corinthians and Athenians cleared out of the meeting and addressing only the Spartans themselves, King Archidamus cautions his people about the realities of war: We must not for one moment flatter ourselves that if we do but ravage their country the war will be at an end. Nay, I fear that we shall bequeath it to our children; for the Athenians with their high spirit will never barter their liberty to save their land, or be terrified like novices at the sight of war. . . . For if we allow ourselves to be stung into premature action by the reproaches of our allies, and waste their country before we are ready, we shall only involve Peloponnesus in more and more difficulty and disgrace. Last of all, briefly but intelligently, is the Spartan ephor (judge) Sthenelaidas, who forces an immediate vote on the war in the assembly.

[Thucydides’ narrative:] The Aeginetans did not venture to send envoys openly, but secretly they acted with the Corinthians, and were among the chief instigators of the war, declaring that they had been robbed of the independence which the treaty guaranteed them. The Lacedaemonians themselves then proceeded to summon any of the allies who had similar charges to bring against the Athenians, and calling their own ordinary assembly told them to speak. Several of them came forward and stated their wrongs. The Megarians alleged, among other grounds of complaint, that they were excluded from all harbors within the Athenian dominion and from the Athenian market, contrary to the treaty. The Corinthians waited until the other allies had stirred up the Lacedaemonians; at length they came forward, and, last of all, spoke as follows:

[The Corinthian representatives]

The spirit of trust, Lacedaemonians, which animates your own political and social life, makes you distrust others who, like ourselves, have something unpleasant to say, and this temper of mind, though favorable to moderation, too often leaves you in ignorance of what is going on outside your own country. Time after time we have warned you of the mischief which the Athenians would do to us, but instead of taking our words to heart, you chose to suspect that we only spoke from interested motives. And this is the reason why you have brought the allies to Sparta too late, not before but after the injury has been inflicted, and when they are smarting under the sense of it. Which of them all has a better right to speak than ourselves, who have the heaviest accusations to make, outraged as we are by the Athenians, and neglected by you? If the crimes which they are committing against Hellas were being done in a corner, then you might be ignorant, and we should have to inform you of them: but now, what need of many words? Some of us, as you see, have been already enslaved; they are at this moment intriguing against others, notably against allies of ours; and long ago they had made all their preparations in the prospect of war. Else why did they seduce from her allegiance Corcyra, which they still hold in defiance of us, and why are they blockading Potidaea, the latter a most advantageous post for the command of the Thracian peninsula, the former a great naval power which might have assisted the Peloponnesians?

And the blame of all this rests on you; for you originally allowed them to fortify their city after the Persian War, and afterwards to build their Long Walls; and to this hour you have gone on defrauding of liberty their unfortunate subjects, and are now beginning to take it away from your own allies. For the true enslaver of a people is he who can put an end to their slavery but has no care about it; and all the more, if he be reputed the champion of liberty in Hellas. And so we have met at last, but with what difficulty! And even now we have no definite object. By this time we ought to have been considering, not whether we are wronged, but how we are to be revenged. The aggressor is not now threatening, but advancing; he has made up his mind, while we are resolved about nothing. And we know too well how by slow degrees and with stealthy steps the Athenians encroach upon their neighbors. While they think that you are too dull to observe them, they are more careful, but when they know that you willfully overlook their aggressions, they will strike and not spare.

Of all Hellenes, Lacedaemonians, you are the only people who never do anything: on the approach of an enemy you are content to defend yourselves against him, not by acts, but by intentions, and seek to overthrow him, not in the infancy but in the fullness of his strength. How came you to be considered safe? That reputation of yours